A certification from Project Management Institute (PMI)® is considered to be of high value in the industry. If one wants to go for a PMI® Certification, why should one not go for a PMP® but an ACP certification? There are several major differences between PMP® and PMI-ACP® certifications.

Difference of Scope and Subject Matter

PMP® covers project management on a very broad level. It gives you the understanding of the concepts of Project Management but not Agile Methodology. If your interest is just in Agile, you should go for ACP. But if you are thinking of grasping Project Management in a general or a broader perspective, then you need to focus on PMP®. Also, if you are planning to move out of the current job profile as you have no interest in it, and want to change your profile, or may be you are getting into your own business, and want to learn how to manage and execute it efficiently, then PMP® is for you. But yes, if you want to learn agile methodology, and be agile, ACP is the one for you.

Different Levels of Operability

PMP® would help you understand project management from a very top-level. It will help you calculate the ROI in the general project management terms. But, ACP is the subset of project management. The latter is the Agile Project Management and the former is the higher level of project management.

The following table depicts the vital differences between the two certifications:

Difference in Approach

In Agile, you learn risk management from the agile perspective, while PMP® would give you an insight of risk management on a general basis. Agile is nowadays getting into every industry. For example, the construction industry.

Gone are the days, when a constructor would say that the possession of the buildings or the houses would be given when the project is ready. Now, the constructors focus on one tower at a time. They complete one tower, including all the cosmetic and other construction things related to one tower; only when it is completely ready and the possession is given, they move to the second tower. In most of the cases, their focus is to give away the possession of one tower, so that they have the name and the fame. People can get into it and see the construction. It’s very rare these days to find constructors working on 5-6 towers at a time and people getting possession of none of the towers.

So you need to decide what’s your future plan and what is that you want to get into. Agile could be the choice, if you want to ensure efficient delivery, while PMP® could be the one if you want to learn how to integrate the different forms of project management and how you would want to solve the dependency out of it. So PMP® is at a higher level, while ACP would focus only on agile.